SATDM2017

Furthermore, to acknowledge that Russia's modern intellectual tradition is an imitation and that the country is culturally dependent on Europe runs counter to the idea of ​​Russian greatness. In the imagination of the country's ruling elites, throughout formed an alternative power center pursuing a global and universal "project," like the Romanov Orthodox Empire or the Soviet Empire. Seeing Russia in a student role made the country appear as a junior partner in the European power concert. From the Pan-Slavic vision of Russia as an originary "cultural-historical type" to the reinvention of the country as an autonomous world within classical Eurasianism, the struggle with this double dilemma has always shaped the discourses of the Russian intelligentsia on the nation and international positioning throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

Behind these exercises in symbolic geography was an aspiration shared by generations of nationalist thinkers: to question the dominant Eurocentric perspective and to insist on the status of Russia as an autonomous civilization, fully sovereign and, at the very least, on a par with any other great European power. . The current ideologues close to the Kremlin draw on this reservoir of metaphors, meanings, images, and tropes. Yet today's opponents of Europe are unaware of Telegram Number Data the fact that their 19th century predecessors, while amassing ample evidence of the impending demise of the West, were thereby positioning themselves in a lively debate within Europe. In fact, his intellectual constructs were largely products of the European spirit.



In his cultural-historical study The Icon and the Axe , James Billington noted a "significant phenomenon" that has perennially marked Russian intellectual history: the figure of the "Western prophet who looks to Russia for the realization of ideas that in the West itself they do not find the attention they deserve»3. Throughout the 19th century, among these "Western prophets" were European mystics, romantics, utopians, reactionaries, and conservative Christians such as Francois-René de Chateaubriand in France, Joseph-Marie de Maistre in Piedmont-Sardinia, Juan Donoso Cortés in Spain, and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel in Germany. In the course of their lively intellectual dialogue with their Russian godbrothers, they provided them with abundant apocalyptic illustrations of European decadence. The dynamic of this debate was recognized and commented on as early as the.